


Taking Flight

by MirrorMystic



Series: Among Eagles [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Action/Adventure, Developing Relationship, F/F, Gen, Lesbians in Space, Space Opera, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 05:11:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14205801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirrorMystic/pseuds/MirrorMystic
Summary: “Careful planning, due diligence, and, yes, some tedious paperwork are what gets these cases closed, ninety-nine percent of the time.”“And the other one percent?” Aabha asked.“Sheer, dumb luck,” Morgan grinned. “Fate, if you’re feeling dramatic.”





	Taking Flight

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome, everyone, to my new project- really an old project that I'd shelved for the past year and a half for personal reasons, and decided it was time to dust off and see if I could do something new. 
> 
> I got my start with a combination of space and urban fantasy- Gaunt's Ghosts, American Gods, The Sandman, Persona 3. This is me going back to my roots- and I hope you'll all enjoy coming for the ride. ^^

~*~  
  
The museum was a decent place to make a stand.  
  
Elevated position. Thick walls. Good view of the surround. Not to mention a basement filled to bursting with antique, contraband weapons, just waiting to wind up in the wrong hands.  
  
Sergeant Waylon Keyes, Planetary Defense, panned his scope across the hilltop, tuning the dial to thermal imaging. Two dozen yellow silhouettes resolved themselves in the gray-green gloom. There would be more inside, surely, their readings blocked by the walls. Renegade militia, holing up in the museum of military history until their demands were met- although what those demands were, no one could say.  
  
They didn’t want money. They’d made no announcement. They’d just occupied the museum grounds, silent as stones, with thermal signatures not quite warm enough to be human.  
  
Sergeant Keyes adjusted the dial on his scope back to standard optics, and the museum became a mere sharp-edged shadow, looming in the fog. In the museum courtyard, a lone renegade huddled behind a low concrete wall, clutching the dual stirrup grips of a tripod-mounted plasma cannon.  
  
That was a nasty surprise to find in their arsenal. It had forced Keyes and his troops to set up their barricade hundreds of meters up the highway, away from the hill and obscured by fog, hoping the insurgents wouldn’t waste ammunition firing blind.  
  
Even with such a heavy weapon employed against them, Keyes was sure this could have remained an issue the PDF could handle.  
  
If it weren’t for the militia’s unhealthy pallor or the tell-tale glow in their vacant eyes, he and his men would have had this under control.  
  
“Are you sure about this, ma’am?” Keyes asked, glancing beside him. “This situation is… ma’am, it’s beneath you. A few cultists with stolen weapons shouldn’t be your concern.”  
  
His companion seemed out of place on a battlefield. She seemed small, unobtrusive and in sharp contrast to Keyes and his troopers, in a loose crimson blouse and pants with a golden scarf draped over her shoulder. Her hands were clasped primly in front of her waist in a gentle, almost timid manner. But there was nothing timid about the crest she wore pinned to her left shoulder- a crescent, an orb, and three diamonds.  
  
“We can take no chances with taint,” she said. She dipped her head politely, her long, dark braid falling forward over her shoulder.  
  
“Please instruct your men to hold the perimeter and ensure that none of the infected escape,” she said. She turned and flashed him a winning smile. “The Order thanks you for your cooperation.”  
  
She turned back and squinted up the hill, the museum the barest shadow in the distant fog. Slowly, almost leisurely, she began to walk.  
  
Keyes turned and nodded to his radio officer. The trooper shrugged his bulky field comms unit off his back and set it on the ground, relaying the order to make ready down the line.  
  
“When do the others arrive?” the trooper asked, pulling his headphones down around his neck.  
  
“What others?” Keyes asked.  
  
“The other Agents.”  
  
Keyes smiled and shook his head.  
  
“We get one,” he said. “One is enough.”  
  
She strode up the hill, her soothing and mild-mannered body language swiftly turning sharp and commanding. She heard the cracks, like distant thunder, as hard rounds punched holes in her path, throwing up clumps of grass and soil. First one, then two, then ten… and all the while, she pushed forward, heedless of the storm of metal flying her way.  
  
She crossed her arms across her chest, and pressed a finger to the badge on her left shoulder. Saffron light wreathed her body like a quilt of molten gold, and she emerged, gleaming, in a suit of shining armor accented with a vivid scarlet sash and tabard.  
  
Immediately, heavier gunfire started streaking her way. The piecemeal potshots by old hunting rifles was joined by blurts of automatic fire and the heavy chugging of mounted machine guns. The hillside beneath her feet rapidly became a smoking, perforated mess. Bullets flashed off her armor in cascades of sparks.  
  
She weathered the assault without even breaking stride.  
  
She opened her arms as if in welcome, drinking in the barrage. A blur of heat haze appeared around her hands, embers crackling from her fingertips. With a bright keening, two rings of magicked fire spun into existence, solidifying into gleaming chakrams in her grasp. She leaned forward, arms swept out at her sides, and began to run.  
  
Light and fire blazed around her form, a golden halo that trailed behind her like the tail of a comet, her coattails splayed out like the wings of a phoenix.  
  
The rain of gunfire became torrential, the windows and balconies of the museum above blazing with muzzle flash as if in a panic. She ran headlong into the barrage, confident that her armor was made of sterner stuff than soft lead, with the smaller rounds outright melting into wisps of smoke as they struck the aura of golden fire spiraling around her luminescent form…  
  
There was a deep, throaty whine, and a beam of superheated plasma shot down the concourse. This, she was obliged to evade- darting aside and letting the beam sear a smoking furrow into the hillside, soil becoming mud becoming smoke and drifting ash.  
  
She crested the hill, and saw her opponent clearly for the first time- a man in grubby civilian clothes, eminently human save for his deathly gray skin, the violet fire in his eyes, and the mark writhing beneath his cheek- the stigma. The brand. The mark of Malice.  
  
The infected gunner retrained his aim and lanced another eye-searing beam of plasma down the concourse. She flicked her wrist, caught the beam on the bladed edge of a chakram, and slapped the beam aside. She deflected the beam upwards, and it scorched the sky, burning a path through the fog and cloud cover as surely as light parting the clouds.  
  
She slapped a second beam over her shoulder, the plasma cracking off of her energized blades. A third beam shot down the concourse and flashed against her chakrams with a squeal like wet glass.  
  
The hilltop exploded into a plume of smoke and vaporized mud.  
  
She somersaulted through the smoke and launched her chakram with a flick of her wrist. Her chakram spun like a sawblade through the air, trailing fire like a comet. With a tortured shriek of metal, it sliced a ragged line along the side of the plasma cannon before burying itself in the gunner’s chest. He gagged, reflexively reaching for the bladed ring transfixing his sternum.  
  
The plasma cannon’s power cell ruptured and burst, flooding the courtyard with azure flame.  
  
The knight flexed her fingers, and her chakrams obediently returned to her waiting hands. She strode through the chemical fire, haloed in golden light and wreathed in flames of her own- crimson and gold.  
  
She was like something out of legend; something that inspired awe in the righteous and base terror in the wicked.  
  
She was the Saffron Paladin.  
  
She was a hero.  
  
She was divine.  
  
She was…  
  
~*~  
  
“Aabha?”  
  
Junior Agent Aabha Puri, crime-fighter, daemon-hunter, and one-day hero of humanity, _squeaked_ when she realized her boss had caught her spacing out at work.  
  
“Y-Yes? Yes?” Aabha said, straightening in her seat. She yelped and snatched at the data-slate sliding off her lap before it hit the floor. “Yes, sir?”  
  
Her mentor, Morgan Telerian, didn’t look the part of a senior agent. He was shorter than Aabha’s willowy grace, baby-faced and unimposing. His green eyes glimmered, flecked with a kaleidoscope of color. He wasn’t handsome, he was… cute. Disarmingly so. Aabha figured it was the Fae in him.  
  
“What were you reading?” Morgan asked.  
  
Aabha glanced down at the article still open on her slate- about how an Order Valkyria’s one-woman assault broke a days-long stalemate between possessed insurgents and the PDF- a single hero doing what dozens of men could not.    
  
She tried her best not to swoon.  
  
“Current events,” Aabha replied, clutching her slate to her chest.  
  
Morgan smiled, and nodded at the door. “Come on. They’re waiting for us.”  
  
The Trance City PDF Garrison was so sparse and functional that Aabha wouldn’t have been surprised if it’d been built out of shipping containers. Gloomy, windowless offices looked out over a sea of desks in drab, unpainted metal, staffed by PDF troopers with bags under their eyes and no more color in their cheeks than their desks. Men slouched in their chairs, nursing caffeine headaches. These uniformed men brought new meaning to the word “fatigues”.  
  
Aabha and Morgan couldn’t have stood out more if they tried. They strode up the aisle like a pair of comets blazing through fog, Morgan in his midnight-blue robe and tasseled white cloak, Aabha in vivid red and gold, the two of them as different as night and day.  
  
The PDF captain was a stern-faced veteran with a graying beard, his face scarred and lined with age. He’d known war- real war, honest war, where you knew exactly who your enemy was and what you were fighting for. He had precious little patience for kids playing cloak and dagger.  
  
Still, Morgan flashed the grizzled captain a mollifying smile, and the captain dipped his chin towards him- a fraction of an inch.  
  
Then he clapped his two huge hands together and snapped the whole room to attention.  
  
“Alright!” Captain Bowen bellowed. “Listen up, you lot! The Order’s here on Hypnos, chasing after bigger fish than the usual drug lords or deadbeats you and I are used to! Now, I want each and every one of you to sit up straight, and listen to what these kids have got to say…”  
  
~*~  
  
There was someone outside her window.  
  
Normally, that wouldn’t bother her. The shelter didn’t have the most privacy even at the best of times, and there was always some garbage music blaring over the speakers, since apparently the Sisters of Mercy didn’t believe in silent contemplation. The noise, the lack of privacy, these were things you eventually got used to.  
  
But there was someone outside her window, and they just wouldn’t shut up.  
  
Kit reached above her head and stretched, her spine popping like a string of firecrackers. She slumped back onto her cot with a sigh, resting her head on the duffel bag carrying everything she owned save the clothes on her back and the pair of boots on the floor. Her neighbors dozed fitfully under frayed blankets or sat upright on their cots, smoking, poking at battered secondhand data-slates, or just staring out into nothing, lost in themselves.  
  
Kit laid back, basking in the light of the lamppost out her window. Though she wore a woman’s face, in the pale yellow glow, she cast a fox’s shadow.  
  
She took a deep breath and sighed.  
  
Home, sweet home.  
  
Then the whimpering outside her window started up again, and she scowled.  
  
She saw the silhouette of a woman outside, hunched and shivering. Withdrawal, Kit guessed. Some beachhead who’d gone too long without a hit of dreamsand and now they were delirious without it. Or some poor sap nursing a broken heart, from the sound of how she kept muttering “he’ll call, he’ll call” like a mantra under her breath.  
  
“Shut up!” Kit snapped, and tossed one of her boots at the window. It banged against the glass and then hit the floor with a thud. No one else in the shelter seemed to care in the slightest.  
  
Kit sighed, before shuffling over and retrieving her fallen boot. She sank back onto her cot and laced it on, before turning up the cuffs on her jeans and pulling on its twin. She pulled a black leather jacket out of her bag and shrugged it on, along with her favorite pair of fingerless gloves.  
  
Her stomach grumbled. She placed a hand over her belly and felt the lingering ache.  
  
It was time to go to work.  
  
Outside, there was a woman wearing a line into the sidewalk, clutching a holocomm as if her life depended on it. She was pacing, counting her steps like a child on the playground, murmuring nonsense to herself- the holy numbers, two, four, eight, the communion, the call…  
  
“He’ll call,” she muttered, a glazed, distant look in her eyes. “He’ll call…”  
  
She slipped her comm into one pocket of her loose, rust-red sweatshirt, before reaching into the other and grasping the knife.  
  
It was a crude, handmade thing, a wire hilt wrapped around a shard of obsidian. She grasped it with trembling fingers, her frantic muttering only stilling when she felt blood on her fingertips. She took a deep, shuddering breath, a wan smile creasing her lips.  
  
“He’ll call,” she echoed, with greater conviction. “He’ll call.”  
  
Someone bumped into her from behind and she cried out, squeezing the blade in her pocket. Blood seeped from where it bit into her palm.  
  
There was someone behind her- a woman, a girl, really, with short, choppy hair and eyes that flashed red with indignation.  
  
“Watch it!” The girl huffed. “I’m walking here!”  
  
The hooded woman nodded, only vaguely registering the girl’s words. She squeezed the knife in her pocket, reassured by the warm wetness in her hands. The girl stormed off, and her thoughts didn’t linger on her long- her whole world was the knife, the blood, the communion, the call…  
  
“He’ll call,” she kept muttering, like a prayer. “He’ll call…”  
  
Kit rounded the corner, her hands in her jacket pockets. She smiled, and squeezed her first take of the night.  
  
A working holocomm. That ought to pay for a dinner or two…  
  
~*~  
  
They were two seconds into Morgan's briefing at the PDF Garrison when a trooper in the back row let out a big yawn, and Aabha thought, well, there was a tone-setter.  
  
“The Order is here to pursue an interplanetary fugitive known as ‘Father Cyrus’,” Morgan said, undeterred by the room’s less-than-rapt attention. “He is a member of the cabal known as the Blood Pact- a name that means little to you, I’m sure.”  
  
There was a murmur of agreement through the assembled crowd, with something that approximated interest. Morgan continued.  
  
“But I can see that you are no strangers to organized crime, and, beneath the religious trappings and ceremony, Cyrus is merely another criminal. The Order thanks you for your patience and cooperation as our investigation proceeds.”  
  
Morgan smiled.  
  
“Until then, we’ll try not to get in the way.”  
  
True to their word, twenty minutes later, Morgan and Aabha found themselves secreted away, out of sight, out of mind, while the PDF went back to business as usual.  
  
Their ‘office’ was more accurately a storage closet that just happened to have two chairs and a desk in it. Morgan’s attempt at turning on the holoboard resulted in a flickering wall panel and dead pixels floating like fireflies, so he just set his data-slate on the table between them and started reviewing their case doc on the palm-sized screen.  
  
Aabha shrank down in her seat until she was leaning her chin on the table. A lock of her hair had somehow wriggled out of her braid and fallen across her face. She blew the strand out of her eyes with a huff.  
  
“Aabha…” Morgan began, patiently.  
  
“It’s just not the welcome I was expecting,” Aabha shrugged.  
  
“Were you expecting a little more swooning?” Morgan asked.  
  
“Well, no, but…” Aabha fidgeted. She leaned in for a conspiratorial whisper, eyes glinting. “...I was hoping for a little _action_ .”  
  
“We shouldn’t be _hoping_ for firefights,” Morgan chided, chuckling. “Organized crime or not, these are still people we’re talking about.”  
  
“Combat drones, then. Oh, or daemons!” Aabha chirped. “You know, for guilt-free heroics!”  
  
Morgan smiled, before reaching forward and patting Aabha on the arm. It was a strangely paternal gesture for someone who looked as youthful as Morgan did. Really, it felt like this ought to be happening the other way around.  
  
“I know it’s not glamorous, Aabha,” Morgan said, “but cases don’t get solved on a battlefield. They get solved here, behind a desk, in front of a holoboard. One that works, anyway. Careful planning, due diligence, and, yes, some tedious paperwork are what gets these cases closed, ninety-nine percent of the time.”  
  
“And the other one percent?” Aabha asked.  
  
“Sheer, dumb luck,” Morgan grinned. “Fate, if you’re feeling dramatic.”  
  
~*~  
  
Street-level pickpocketing was a dying art.  
  
Kit knew all the best thieves were digital, nowadays. A thief wasn’t a kid on the street; it was some asshole in a suit, hoarding money in hidden bank accounts and dodging his taxes. The transition to Alliance credit meant almost nobody carried cash on them anymore.  
  
Kit wasn’t deterred. It was all about knowing what to take- and who to take it from. Comms, lighters, drugs, jewelry- better than a credstick, no better than a hunk of plastic if you couldn’t crack the encryption, and Kit was no hacker. She was a thief.  
  
Kit ambled her way through the Trance City rush hour, swept along in a tide of hurrying bodies, the stolen holocomm in her pocket gradually getting company- two lighters, a pack of cigarettes, a pair of handsome signet rings, and a little plastic baggie of fat white pills that Kit hoped would fetch a decent price. She moved, eyes alert, picking her targets, her hands only leaving her pockets when they had somewhere better to be.  
  
Once, she’d gotten lucky and taken a brooch that had turned out to be an artfully concealed personal shield generator. For a month or so, she’d eaten like a queen. Or, at least, she’d had more than thin soup. She wondered if she’d find anything nearly as good today.  
  
Kit had a feeling she wouldn’t. Not tonight. There was trouble in the air. She could feel it.  
  
Up ahead, she caught a glimpse of something going down in the middle of the street, saw men in dark suits and red ties…  
  
A staccato of sound erupted down the street. A tidal wave of fear swept through the crowd, and they fled, scattering indoors or onto adjoining streets.  
  
Kit ducked into a shadowed alcove as the crowd dispersed around her. She watched from the shadows, as gunfire filled the air…  
  
~*~  
  
Morgan and Aabha sat up sharply as both their earpieces chimed at the same time. A woman’s voice came on over the link.  
  
_“Shots fired downtown. Marking position on your slate. Jaki and I are en route to scene.”_ _  
_ _  
_ “Read you, Syl,” Morgan nodded. “Aabha, let’s go.”  
  
“I’ll drive!” Aabha chimed, practically leaping out of her chair.  
  
~*~  
  
It was over in an instant.  
  
It was a rhythm that Sylwyn Telerian was all-too-familiar with, the interminable tension punctuated by sudden, sharp bursts of violence and adrenaline. You wait, dread simmering in your gut, until it finally boils over in heat and light and desperation- until there’s the stunned silence of aftermath, like the moment of eerie calm after a bomb goes off. Wait, then hurry up. Hurry up, and then wait. The rhythm of a soldier’s life. Not that Syl was a soldier anymore.  
  
“What a waste,” tutted her companion beside her.  
  
Syl nodded in silent agreement, crossing her hands over her chest. Embroidered vines of climbing ivy crept up the cuffs and collar of her dark blazer, matching the forest-green turtleneck beneath. She stood a stern, muted contrast with her partner, garbed entirely in vivid white.  
  
“You could travel the length and breadth of the galaxy, and still, you would find more of the same…” Jaki Amaro mused. He paced reverently among the ruined bodies strewn across the street, his stark white robe somehow remaining immaculate despite trailing in blood and grit.  
  
“Violent lives, ending violently…” Jaki continued. “A life of conflict, with no time for friends… so that when it’s done, only our enemies leave roses.”  
  
Syl glanced at him. “That’s… poetic.”  
  
“That’s Alan Moore,” Jaki smirked. “ _Watchmen._ ”  
  
A hovercar zipped up to the PDF barricade roping off the street. It was a Remora-class anti-gravity skimmer, a sleek, graceful dart of a craft that rocked gently on a frictionless suspension field. Unfortunately, the way it barreled down the street was conspicuously lacking in both sleekness and grace.  
  
Aabha came bounding in to the scene, practically bouncing on her heels with excitement. That excitement abruptly stilled when she saw the massacre laid out on the street, blood running in treacly rivers and gathering in rank, clotted pools.  
  
Morgan followed at her heels, blanching less at the grisly scene that awaited him and more from the harrowing ride here.  
  
Morgan sighed. Teenage drivers.  
  
“Syl. Father Amaro,” Morgan said, nodding to them in turn. “What have we got?”  
  
“Seven dead,” Syl reported. “ID came back on six of them, unconfirmed gang connections, but the black suits and red ties say Syndicate. They were armed with laspistols- no shell casings, obviously, but each one has a fully drained power cell. Emptied in a panic.”  
  
“But none of them died from las-rounds,” Aabha chimed in. Her seniors turned to look at her, and she swallowed hard, fighting the churning in her stomach. “These bodies… there are no laser burns. These are slashes. Claw marks. Like they were mauled by a bear.”  
  
“Or by something worse than a bear…” Jaki muttered. He took a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh. He closed his eyes and swayed lightly on his feet, as if in a trance.  
  
“What do you see, Father?” Morgan asked.  
  
Jaki was a very tall, very gaunt man with skin the color of freshly-tilled earth, the sculptural arch of his skull crowned with the short, tight ringlets of his hair. Normally, his eyes were a warm, welcoming brown. But when he opened his eyes, gently touching the ankh on a chain around his neck, they were so deep and so dark it was like looking into the night sky.  
  
“There will be a meeting tonight,” Jaki intoned, the cosmos spinning in the darkness of his eyes. “A deal, struck between two rival gangs. These six,” Jaki gestured to the men lying broken on the ground. “They thought they could make a better offer than their rivals. Clearly, they were mistaken. Failing that, they sought the details of the exchange taking place tonight- information they thought they could win with a little show of force. That, too, did not end well for them.”  
  
Jaki exhaled, the darkness leaving his eyes. He turned to Morgan.  
  
“I know where they’re making the deal.”  
  
Morgan nodded gravely. He turned to Syl.  
  
“Who was the seventh?”  
  
Syl crossed over to the body- little more than tatters of red clothing and a still-smouldering silhouette scorched into the pavement by an otherworldly fire.  
  
“No ID,” Syl said. “But there’s this… and I think that says it all, really.”  
  
Morgan pulled his sleeve over his fingers and carefully lifted the knife- a hilt of coiled wire twisted around a shard of obsidian, slick with blood and tar and still wisping smoke.  
  
“Summoner,” Aabha said quietly.  
  
Morgan nodded.  
  
“The Blood Pact is here.”  
  
~*~  
  
_“Breaking news today: seven people have been found dead after a firefight broke out at the corner of Fifth and 72nd…”_  
  
Kit wrenched her eyes away from the screen above the counter, fighting down the nausea in her chest. She shuffled down to the far end of the bodega and thunked her forehead against the fridge doors. The glass was blessedly cool. She heaved a sigh, her breath fogging the glass, before pulling open the door and slipping a bottle of soda into her jacket.  
  
“Kit,” the man at the counter warned without even looking up from his data-slate, “you _were_ going to pay for that, right?”  
  
“Get off my ass, Manuel,” Kit grumbled, striding up to the counter. “You know I don’t shit where I eat.”  
  
Manuel sniffed, idly flicking down his slate with his thumb. “What do you have for me tonight?”  
  
Kit flicked a glance towards the door, before turning her pockets out onto the counter. The lighters, the cigarettes, the signet rings, the baggie of pills, all disappeared into a cabinet under the counter. But when Kit set the holocomm on the counter, Manuel paused.  
  
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Seems like you could use a working comm.”  
  
“Who would call me?” Kit shrugged.  
  
“Your friends?” Manuel offered dryly.  
  
Kit snorted. “Nah. I gotta get rid of it. This thing’s burning a hole in my pocket.”  
  
She slid the comm across the counter. Manuel was about to take it when it buzzed, and Manuel recoiled as if it were about to explode. Kit and Manuel glanced at each other dumbly.  
  
“...You can take that, if you want,” Manuel said.  
  
The indicator light blinked for an audio-only call- no video. Small mercies. Kit swallowed hard, before raising the comm to her ear and keying it on.  
  
“Go,” she said.  
  
The comm crackled, distorted.  
  
_“Midnight. 200 Selwire Street. Don’t get followed. Bring your knife.”_  
  
~*~  
  
This was a bad idea.  
  
Kit knew that from the very beginning. Getting involved with the gangs was never a good idea. Pawning a comm stolen from some no-name gangster wannabe, fine. But this, whatever this was? This was something else.  
  
When it turned out 200 Selwire Street was a grungy-looking warehouse on the very edge of the city, well, that kinda confirmed it.  
  
Hypnos was a planet of packed hive cities separated by vast tracts of desert. Trance City was just one of the many mega-cities dotting the desert like oases, nestled under the shimmering dome of the city-wide shield that kept Hypnos’ infamous sandstorms at bay. Mag-rails linked these cities together, the train network forming bridges over the vast sea of sand. The trains were primarily for cargo, not passengers. On Hypnos, it was common for a citizen to live and die without ever leaving their hive.  
  
With a look at this piece-of-crap loading dock, Kit could easily see why.  
  
Kit at least had the sense not to use the front door. She scrambled up a drain pipe and slipped onto the roof. Framed by moonlight and the shimmering blue field of the barrier surrounding the city, Kit eased open a high window and slipped inside.  
  
Amid rows and rows of packing crates and stacked, discarded furniture, two gangs were squaring off under the flickering white light of chained, bare bulbs.  
  
Kit didn’t know why she was here. Practicality and plain old survival instinct said she shouldn’t have gotten involved. The daredevil in her imagined her swiping something big right from under the noses of two notorious gangs, to their mutual ire. The part of her that enjoyed, y’know, _being alive_ said she shouldn’t have swiped the damn comm in the first place.  
  
Still, she’d shown up. She was right on time. She made sure she wasn’t followed. And she even brought her own knife.  
  
Audacity, and curiosity, kept her perched in the rafters, clinging to the shadows of a steel support beam.  
  
Curiosity killed the Kit, or however that saying went. Kit frowned, crept a little closer to the huddle of bodies below, and listened…  
  
~*~  
  
Dr. Gregory Matthias hated supers.  
  
This was an irrational hatred, he knew, considering his career, his livelihood, was couched entirely in the acquisition, exchange, study, and occasional dissection of supers. It was the lifeblood of the EXC- the Esoteric Xenobiology Center, bridging the gap between the human and the superhuman.  
  
Still, there was something about supers that really got under Matthias’ skin. Perhaps it was the smell- the cloying, sickening, unmistakable smell of sorcery.  
  
The warehouse was rank with it.  
  
Matthias stood, in a dove-gray three-piece suit and electric blue tie, flanked by an honor guard of a dozen of his techmarines. Each was a menacing escort, made faceless by their mirrored visors and gleaming black carapace armor, clutching lightning rifles and railguns at the very bleeding edge of modern technology. Electric blue light swam in circuits down the gaps in their plate.  
  
The rabble assembled against them, and prowling through the warehouse like vermin, could not have been more different. Addicts and street scum, thin-boned and hollow-eyed, wearing light fabrics and leathers scarcely fit for battle. They held ritual knives in trembling hands, a few clutching outdated hard-round pistols, shotguns, SMGs. This wasn’t a proper fighting force. It was a mob; a riot.  
  
Matthias hated the lot of them. But not so much that he wouldn’t still take their money.  
  
Matthias stepped forward into the ring of pale light cast by a single overhanging bulb, flanked by a pair of troopers. A man stepped forward, dressed in incongruous red robes, his fingers festooned with brass rings. His flock watched from the shadows, eyes glinting. Foul magic hung heavy in the air.  
  
“Do you have the cash?” Matthias asked.  
  
Bloodletter Ametar Kaul, sorcerer and keeper of the faith, reached out one of his beringed hands and beckoned. An acolyte in a red hoodie scurried up with a briefcase in tow. He opened it, revealing the stacks of bills within.  
  
“Do you have what we agreed on?” Kaul asked.  
  
A trooper stepped forward, bearing a briefcase of his own. Matthias shuddered as he saw every red-robed acolyte follow the briefcase with their eyes, as if entranced.  
  
“You’ve brought quite a crowd with you for a simple exchange,” Matthias said evenly.  
  
“You cannot fault us a little caution,” Kaul shrugged. “We wouldn’t want things to go awry.”  
  
“Please.” Matthias scoffed. “We are professionals.”  
  
Kaul’s lips curled into a wicked smile. “Are you, now?”  
  
A sharp cry pierced the air. Out of the shadows, a huge, shaven-headed brute of a man emerged, his arm clamped tight around Kit’s throat. Her legs dangled above the ground, kicking and struggling to no avail.  
  
Kaul’s eyes glinted dangerously in the light. “Who’s this, now, eh, Matthias? We caught a little birdie of yours, skulking around the roof. Care to explain that?”  
  
Matthias scowled. “I’ve never seen this girl in my life.”  
  
The brute dropped Kit at Kaul’s feet. Immediately, she had an obsidian ritual knife against her throat.  
  
“Then I don’t suppose it would matter to you if I painted this concrete floor with her blood?” Kaul asked with a jackal grin.  
  
Matthias shrugged. “Not in the slightest.”  
  
Kaul paused. He blinked, then smiled. “...Well, then. In that case-”  
  
Kit chomped down on Kaul’s wrist. He howled in pain and slapped her away, his muscle, Goros, getting an arm around her throat from behind.  
  
“Why, you…!” Kaul snarled, snatching his ritual knife off the floor and leveling it at Kit’s chest.  
  
The doors exploded.  
  
Morgan burst into the warehouse with his team and a squad of PDF troopers at his back, his badge in one hand, a compact phase pistol in the other.  
  
“Law enforcement!” Morgan cried. “Drop it or drop!”  
  
Gunfire slammed into the pane of shimmering blue light that appeared in Morgan’s hands an instant after he dropped his badge. He flexed his fingers, and his barrier shot forward like a freight train, plowing into the crowd and sending them flying.  
  
A ferocious three-way firefight erupted across the warehouse and painted the darkness with muzzle flash and lancing energy. Morgan flexed his fingers, and another barrier manifested in his hands. Hard rounds spanked against the barrier and made it wobble like wet glass. Twin beams of electricity shot out of the darkness and flashed against the shield; Morgan grit his teeth, flicked his wrist, and sent the lightning back where it came from. Two Exchange troopers fell to the ground, thrashing and convulsing as their overloaded armor shorted out.  
  
A sound, like otherworldly howling, joined the cacophony of violence and gunfire filling the air. Phantom beasts were leaping into the fray, wolf-like predators of raw mana unleashed by the novice summoners of the Blood Pact. Acolytes brandished their ritual blades and cut open tears in the air itself, unleashing whatever half-formed daemons spilled in through the breach.  
  
Flickering like heat haze, a pack of phantoms charged across the floor, creatures of claw and tentacle, fog and flame. PDF troopers stumbled back, wrestling with half-corporeal beasts, crying out in confusion and dismay as invisible fangs tore into them and their shots hit nothing but air.  
  
A trooper cried out as a phantom beast leapt onto his chest, its jaws snapping at his face. A hand closed around the scruff of the thing’s neck and hurled it down,  
  
A pearl staff impaled the beast to the ground. It shuddered and died, vanishing into a gout of violet flame. Jaki yanked his staff up out of the blackened silhouette on the concrete floor, whirled around and smashed another phantom beast out of the air, mid-leap, the ankh atop his staff shining with a brilliant white light.  
  
The acolytes charged, daggers in hand. A squad of knights stopped them in their tracks, armed with swords and shields and garbed in forest green. A dozen identical phantasms divided the cultist forces and drove them into disarray, each one shimmering with an emerald glow that an un-gifted mind could not see. The real Syl moved through the crowd of mirages, ducking and weaving past her conjured decoys and sinking her blade into hapless acolytes- fighters who thought they were giving it their all, when in truth, they weren’t even looking at her.  
  
Goros hustled Kit down into cover behind a storage crate as the firefight grew more intense. He peeked out, then jerked back into cover as a pair of shots gouged splinters in the wood.  
  
Kit glanced over the lip of the crate, her eye flicking from the team of feds who kicked down the door- to the briefcase sitting, abandoned, by her feet.  
  
“Now you just stay right here and don’t do anything stupid,” Goros grumbled, his hold around Kit’s neck loosening for one crucial second.  
  
There was a flash of yellow light. Somehow, Kit had wriggled out of his grasp- Goros glanced around, frantic, searching.  
  
There was a fox on all fours in front of him. It leapt up, suffused in a golden glow, and became a woman.  
  
“Boss!” Goros snarled. “She’s a super!”  
  
Goros lunged forward, but Kit darted aside, wind curling around her form. She snatched the briefcase up off the floor and smashed it into the back of Goros’ skull so hard it left a dent. Then she clutched her impromptu prize to her chest, and ran.  
  
Aabha took a deep breath, trying to keep her cool amidst of sea of fanatical cultists and flashing blades. Obsidian daggers glinted in the dark, clashing against the bright silver sunbursts of her chakrams. Aabha caught thrusting daggers on the prongs of her ring-blades, turning the ritual knives aside with deft flicks of her wrists. Her chakrams flashed in her hands, and she wielded them like knives or like knuckle-dusters, punching, slashing, stabbing with the forward prongs.  
  
Aabha saw the glint of a rifle barrel and fell to her knees just as a burst of automatic fire shredded the cultist in front of her. She pivoted at the waist and let her chakrams fly from her hands, each one a comet trailing a tail of magicked fire.  
  
The gunner lost both their arms at the elbows to Aabha’s expert throw, howling in pain and falling to their knees, their weapon clattering to the floor. Aabha flexed, and her chakrams flew back into her waiting hands.  
  
Then she heard the loud bang of a tiny slip of a girl stoving a man’s head in with a briefcase and making a run for it.  
  
“Aabha!” she heard Morgan cry out.  
  
“I see her!” she called.  
  
She wasn’t the only one. Dr. Matthias watched and scowled as some street urchin, a nobody, found the audacity to make off with his work. He turned to the trooper beside him- only for that trooper’s head to explode in a burst of gore and electrified shrapnel. He grit his teeth and swore, fumbling with his sidearm.  
  
A ritual knife pressed against his throat.  
  
“This was not the deal we agreed,” Matthias choked out.  
  
“ _I_ make the deals, here,” Kaul said coldly, and swiped the blade aside.  
  
Matthias went still, as a bloody crescent opened across his throat and started bleeding crimson all over his nice gray suit. But then wisps of violet fire gathered around the dreadful wound, and an awful keening filled the air, a hellish sound like the wind through hanging trees…  
  
Matthias’ body convulsed, the blood around his throat turning vile and frothy. The air shivered around his form, like heat haze. With a sudden, sickening crunch, his body lurched up into the rift in reality torn open at his throat- and burst out the other side in an explosive, expanding mass of rippling muscle and violet flame.  
  
It rolled out of the corpse like fog, slapping its meaty knuckles onto the concrete floor. It rose, as tall as three men on each others’ shoulders and just as wide, fat, yellow horns rising from a huge, misshapen head. It was almost comically top-heavy, a warp thing, an impossible thing, something from beyond dragged into this world and struggling to be understood, to be contained in a shape it was never meant to wear.  
  
The PDF troopers stared, aghast, at the monster ripped from myth and legend now walking in their midst.  
  
“Oh dear,” Jaki sighed, leaning on his staff. “This is gonna hurt…”  
  
The daemon bellowed, shivering the warehouse with its unearthly cry. It fixed Aabha with its beady black gaze, rearing back and bringing its two massive fists crashing down-  
  
Syl grunted as she took the superhuman blow on her shield, gritting her teeth and struggling to remain standing beneath the beast’s weight. She flicked a switch on her vambrace and a crackling blue energy field hummed to life around her shield. The daemon shrieked in pain as the energy field scorched and melted the flesh of its fists. Syl smashed the daemon away, clicking in the stud on the hilt of her sword and similarly wreathing the blade with blue fire.  
  
“Go!” Syl called over her shoulder. Aabha hesitated.  
  
“But-”  
  
“Go!”  
  
Aabha darted away, and light exploded behind her- energy in electric blue and twilight violet, along with the searing red of a dozen PDF lasrifles on full-auto. The daemon roared with such thunder it made the ground shake, swiping in fury at the ants at its feet. Aabha squeezed her chakrams tight, and kept on running.  
  
~*~  
  
Kit ran until her heart thudded in her chest, the briefcase heavy and cumbersome in her hands. She stopped to catch her breath, glancing up and down the street, unable to shake the feeling that she’d been followed. She turned, and looked up at the moon. It seemed eerie tonight, sinister, casting long, misshapen shadows down the aisles of the loading dock.  
  
Something flashed across the ground. Kit cried out, clutching her chest in pain.  
  
“You have something that doesn’t belong to you,” came a voice.  
  
Bloodletter Kaul rounded the corner. Kit tensed and made to run-  
  
Kaul waved a hand, and a tendril of darkness separated from his shadow and scythed across Kit’s own. Kit gagged in pain, dropping the briefcase to the pavement. She hugged her chest with both hands, a searing pain lancing through her stomach despite having no visible wound. She sank to her knees, fighting for breath.  
  
“What did you do to me…? What… what are you…?” Kit eked out.  
  
Kaul ambled up the road at a leisurely pace, idly examining his ritual knife. He glanced at Kit, as if only noticing her now. He flicked the ritual knife down and buried it in the shadow of Kit’s leg.  
  
A phantom pain stabbed through Kit’s calf and pinned her to the ground. She gazed up at him, defiant, her eyes watering from the burning in her legs.  
  
“The question is, what are _you_ ?” Kaul asked, stepping around Kit and retrieving the briefcase. “Who are you, girl? Why do you think to stand against the Blood Pact?”  
  
Despite everything, Kit smiled.  
  
“Y’know, this is really gonna steam your clams,” Kit shrugged, “but I’m only here outta sheer, dumb luck.”  
  
Kaul slapped her across the face, a wild look in his eyes.  
  
“Don’t lie to me!” he snapped. “There must be a reason you’re here!”  
  
“Nah, man,” Kit said, nursing a bloody lip. She grinned. “Sometimes, shit just happens.”  
  
Kaul seethed, and drew back his arm to slap her again.  
  
Aabha’s first chakram sliced a bloody line down Kaul’s arm. He whirled around in a rage, and slapped the second out of the air. He barked in frustration, turning back to Kit-  
  
Kit yanked the obsidian dagger out of her shadow and plunged it into Kaul’s chest.  
  
Kaul stopped short, gagging on the blade. A fetid, volcanic red light shone from around the blade lodged in his ribs. He met Kit’s eyes, a hellish light rising up from within his throat and behind his eyes. He shrieked.  
  
“ **_HUBRIS…!_ ** ”  
  
Kaul’s body rose into the air, borne aloft with wicked purpose, horrid light illuminating his veins a volcanic red. Kit tried to get up, but stumbled, her calf still throbbing, her chest aching with phantom pains.  
  
Aabha pulled Kit into her arms. The last thing Kit saw was a dome of shimmering blue energy rising around them both- before the world exploded into crimson light.  
  
~*~  
  
Kit was adrift, lost in herself.  
  
Sometimes she was at Manuel’s bodega; sometimes she was on her cot at the church; sometimes, she was still sitting on the pavement of the loading dock, sheltered in that strange girl’s arms.  
  
Sometimes, she’d wake up and see a man all in white with a kind smile and deep, dark eyes. The girl in red would be waiting, watching anxiously from the door. The man in white would shoo her away, before turning back to her, pulling darkness onto his hands as if they were gloves, the night sky shining in the darkness of his eyes.  
  
Eventually, Kit found herself sitting in a broom closet of an office, across from a kid in a midnight-blue robe and a woman in forest-green guarding the door.  
  
“Himari Sato,” Morgan began, reviewing the file on his data-slate, “Street name ‘Kit’. Short for ‘kitsune’, no doubt. The trickster fox.”  
  
Kit glowered at him, her arms folded across her chest.  
  
“My name is Morgan Telerian,” Morgan said. He raised a hand to Syl. “This is my older sister, Sylwyn Telerian.”  
  
“Good cop,” Kit shrugged. She glanced at Syl and nodded. “Bad cop.”  
  
Morgan cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. We just have a few questions for you, Miss Sato-”  
  
“I know how this goes,” Kit cut him off. “You fixed me up and now I owe you, is that right? So what is it? Blackmail? You gonna make me your errand girl?”  
  
“You haven’t had a particularly good experience with law enforcement, have you?” Morgan asked dryly.  
  
Kit snorted.  
  
“I can imagine why, though,” Morgan said lightly, flicking down his slate. “Shoplifting. Robbery. Petty theft. You have a list of charges we could level against you as long as my arm.”  
  
“Good thing we’re both so short, then.”  
  
Beside her, Syl tried her best not to smile.  
  
Kit pushed on. “So what? Is the Order picking up petty thieves now? ‘Cuz that shit sounds like grunt work to me.”  
  
“There’s another question, then,” Morgan said. “What does The Order mean to you?”  
  
Kit’s gaze flicked from the crescent, orb, and diamonds pinning Morgan’s cloak in place, to an identical crest fixed to the lapel of Syl’s blazer. She eyed the crest with scorn.  
  
“It’s a myth,” she spat. “A faerie tale.”  
  
“An interesting choice of words,” Morgan said, “as Syl and I are both Fae.”  
  
“I mean what I said,” Kit said, levelly. “I believe in the Order the same way I believe in God. Does it exist? Sure. But what the fuck has it ever done for me? You’re not here to clean up my city. If it weren’t for the freaks with the knives, you wouldn’t even be here.”  
  
Morgan nodded, but said nothing. Kit sighed and sank into her chair.  
  
“Well. You got me. Cuff me, officer. I’m a thief, and I don’t think I’ve ever denied it. But before you take me away, just tell me this: what was in that damn briefcase? Diamonds? Platinum?”  
  
Morgan and Syl exchanged looks.  
  
“Blood,” Syl replied. “Two hundred vials of sampled, superhuman blood.”  
  
Kit blinked at her. “What the fuck?”  
  
“You didn’t steal from a gang,” Morgan said. “You stole from a cult. A very powerful, very dangerous cult, known as the Blood Pact. And as soon as word gets out that you killed one of their priests, well- there is only one way we can guarantee your safety.”  
  
“I’m _flattered_ ,” Kit said, bitter.  
  
“So let me ask you,” Morgan began. “Do you want the chance to make a difference in the world?”  
  
“Are you volunteering me for community service, because I think I’d rather just take the jailtime,” Kit drawled.  
  
She laughed scornfully at her own joke. But Morgan wasn’t laughing. He leaned forward, intently meeting Kit’s crimson eyes with his own glinting green.  
  
“No, Miss Sato,” Morgan said carefully. “I am offering you a job.”  
  
~*~  
  
Kit stood on the elevator up to the starport, her duffel bag limp in her hands.  
  
Her whole life was in that bag, or in her pockets, or on her person. And here she was, ready to leave Trance City and this dust bowl of a planet behind. She took a deep breath and let it out slow. The girl in red was fidgeting beside her. Ava, or Abby, or something. She’d get it.  
  
“So, um…” Aabha began. “Miss Sato…?”  
  
Kit rolled her eyes. “Kit. Call me Kit.”  
  
Aabha smiled. “...’Kitty’...?”  
  
Kit almost laughed. Almost. “No. Kit.”  
  
Aabha nodded. “Morgan- that is, Senior Agent Telerian- asked me to give you the tour, help you get settled, if… if that’s okay.”  
  
Kit shrugged. “That’s fine.”  
  
Aabha beamed. “I look forward to working with you, Kit,” she said, and clapped a hand on Kit’s shoulder.  
  
Kit went stiff. She reached up and carefully pried Aabha’s hand off of her.  
  
“I don’t like to be touched.” Kit said, stiff.  
  
“O-Oh. Sorry.”  
  
“No, it’s… okay.”  
  
Aabha smiled in sheepish apology. Kit hated how she smiled at everything. She was too cute to be a fed.  
  
The elevator opened up onto the launch deck with a clunk and whir of metal. Morgan, Syl, and Jaki were already waiting, making idle conversation at the foot of the boarding ramp. There were others with them- a short, squat woman with nappy hair in grimy engineering coveralls; a woman in a duster and broad-grimmed hat, squinting at them from behind rose-tinted glasses; a woman in a sundress who reminded Kit of her late mother, if her mother had been six feet tall with horns poking out of her hair.  
  
There was a younger man in a rumpled suit waiting nearest the elevator door. He was sitting on a storage crate, having a smoke. He looked up as Aabha led Kit into the bay.  
  
“Who’s this?” he asked.  
  
“She’s new,” Aabha replied.  
  
He grinned and gave Kit a nod.  
  
“How _you_ doin’?”  
  
“I don’t like men,” Kit said breezily. She walked on past without breaking stride, while Aabha stifled a laugh.  
  
They paused at the foot of the boarding ramp, Kit feeling the curious eyes of the crew upon her. She looked up at the ship, nudging Aabha with her elbow.  
  
“So this is your ride, huh?” Kit wondered. “Man. What a piece of shit.”  
  
Aabha snorted, and Kit found herself smiling. As irksome as it was for Aabha to be so cheerful all the time, Kit still liked that she could make her laugh.  
  
“ _Excuse_ me,” chided the woman in the broad-brimmed hat. “It’s _my_ piece of shit.”  
  
“That’s the captain,” Aabha whispered in Kit’s ear. “Robyn.”  
  
“It’s called the _Sparrow_ ,” Robyn said proudly. “Welcome aboard.”  
  
~*~  
  
_The World has changed._ _  
_ _  
_ _But some things never change._ _  
_ _  
_ _After years of searching, humanity, once rendered blind to the supernatural as penance for a cataclysmic war, has Reawakened to their knowledge of the magical world. With their Potential rekindled, humanity has taken to the stars, and has brought their supernatural brethren along with them._ _  
_ _  
_ _With the scope of civilization growing ever larger, it falls to a group known as The Order to maintain peace- Angels, Demons, Humans, and Fae, united in purpose against Malice, the enemy of all life. It is the darkness lurking at the edge of the cosmos, and the whispering venom in the hearts of corrupt men._ _  
_ _  
_ _In this time of conflict, humanity needs heroes more than ever._ _  
_ _  
_ _This is not a tale of heroes. This is a story about people trying to get by-_ _  
_ _  
_ _-the tale of a little bird who flew among eagles._ _  
_  
~*~


End file.
